Cooking Diary: A Six-Year Recipe for Success
MYTONIA, the developer behind the wildly popular time-management game Cooking Diary, reveals the recipe for its six-year reign. Whether you're a fellow developer seeking inspiration or a player curious about the game's creation, this detailed breakdown offers valuable insights.
Key Ingredients:
- 431 captivating story episodes
- 38 vibrant characters
- 8,969 diverse in-game elements
- 905,481 thriving guilds
- A wealth of engaging events and contests
- A dash of humor
- Grandpa Grey's secret ingredient (revealed later!)
The Cooking Process:
Step 1: Crafting the Narrative:
Begin with a compelling storyline, rich in humor and unexpected twists. Populate the world with a colorful cast of characters. The narrative unfolds across various restaurants and districts, starting with your grandfather Leonard's Burger Joint and expanding to locations like Colafornia, Schnitzeldorf, and Sushijima. Cooking Diary boasts 160 unique culinary establishments spread across 27 distinct districts, ensuring a steady stream of virtual patrons.
Step 2: Customization Extravaganza:
Enrich the game world with an extensive array of customizable items: over 8,000 in total! This includes 1,776 outfits, 88 facial feature sets, 440 hairstyles, and more than 6,500 decorative items for players' homes and restaurants. Add pets and 200 customizable pet outfits for extra personalization.
Step 3: Dynamic In-Game Events:
Introduce a continuous flow of engaging tasks and events. Leverage robust analytics to ensure a balanced and rewarding experience. The key is layering events—each individually enjoyable and complementing others—creating a consistently exciting gameplay loop. August, for example, featured nine concurrent events, showcasing this layered approach.
Step 4: Building a Thriving Guild Community:
Cooking Diary boasts over 905,000 guilds. Introduce guild events and tasks strategically, ensuring a gradual integration and avoiding scheduling conflicts to maximize player participation.
Step 5: Learning from Setbacks:
Embrace mistakes as learning opportunities. The Cooking Diary team learned valuable lessons from the initial launch of pets in 2019. An adjustment to the pet acquisition system, making them unlockable through events, resulted in a 42% revenue increase.
Step 6: Strategic Marketing and Presentation:
The casual games market is competitive. Stand out with a robust social media presence, creative messaging, engaging contests, and a keen awareness of current trends. Cooking Diary's successful social media strategy on Instagram, Facebook, and X serves as a prime example. Strategic collaborations, such as partnerships with Netflix's Stranger Things and YouTube, further amplify the game's reach.
Step 7: Continuous Innovation:
Maintaining success requires constant evolution. Cooking Diary's enduring popularity stems from its commitment to adding new content, experimenting with presentation, and refining gameplay mechanics. Regular updates, from event calendar adjustments to gameplay balancing, keep the experience fresh and engaging.
Step 8: The Secret Ingredient: Passion!
Grandpa Grey's secret ingredient is passion. A successful game is born from genuine love for the craft.
Download Cooking Diary on the App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Microsoft Store, and AppGallery.
